Richard Prosser's belated apology for his mad, racist "Wogistan" column in Investigate magazine this morning capped the retreat commenced by his party leader Winston Peters and his editor Ian Wishart. But while everyone's washing their hands, it's worth noting that everyone here has form.

It's around 10 years since I conducted my first (and thus far only) interview with Winston Peters, for Mediawatch on Radio New Zealand. To be honest, the thing that stays with me is that he wore his headphones upside down, slung under his chin, to avoid indignity to his hairdo.

Peters would say something tenuous, then flash me his big, beaming smile, as if to say that we all knew it was all a bit of a put-on. I'm not really sure what weight he put on what he told me before the interview started: that if I was to read deep into the Koran I'd find alarming material about the real intentions of Islam. Surprised, I put it to him that a similar reading of the Holy Bible or the Torah might find some alarming material too.

"In New Zealand the Muslim community has been quick to show us their more moderate face, but there is a militant underbelly here as well.

"These two groups, the moderate and militant, fit hand and glove.

"Underneath it all the agenda is to promote fundamentalist Islam - indeed these groups are like the mythical Hydra, a serpent underbelly with multiple heads, capable of striking at any time and in any direction," Mr Peters said.

Yes. The enemy within. It could be the family that runs your local dairy. It casts an interesting light on this tidbit from yesterday:

Former Labour MP Ashraf Choudhary, a Muslim, called on Mr Peters to "remove this cancer from the party".

"It's uncalled for and racist. This kind of person has got no place in our Parliament."

He said NZ First had recently been reaching out to New Zealand's 30,000-strong Muslim community.

"Winston Peters has been sending feelers out to the ethnic and Muslim community to sell [that] he has become a mainstream party, reaching to all Kiwis. This has done no good to his party."

Mr Prosser agrees that the article did not have balance, and does not represent the views of New Zealand First.

Meanwhile, Ian Wishart, who published Prosser's absurd rant, cruised through an interview on Seven Sharp last night, carefully distancing himself from what he'd published. His longtime columnist Prosser, he said, used "exagerrated points to get his main point across," and to "provoke debate and get people talking."

As editor, he admitted to merely having "skimmed throgh" Prosser's column and declared "maybe if I'd read it properly and been in a sound state of mind I might have picked it up."

"Wishart not of sound mind," possibly isn't news, but what he did next is interesting. He went home and republished his magazine's 2007 story, Preachers of Hate, which said that extremist wahabbi preachers had been allowed to repeatedly enter the country and preach hatred to the local Muslim community.

As is often the case with Wishart's scoops, there's an actual story buried deep in the breathless language, tenuous associations and creepy, endless obsessions with Helen Clark -- one on which more light is shed in a leaked 2006 cable from the US Embassy in Wellington. Ironically -- or perhaps inevitably -- the embassy cable offers a more balanced view than Investigate.

Wishart was less guarded in his rambling 2002 essay, Islam vs the West, where he declared:

Muslims in the West must decide whether they will stand with the West against the move by one religion to become a world government, or whether they wish to join that move. If the decision is the latter, then those Muslims would, under New Zealand law, be exposing themselves to treason charges if they were in any way to assist an outside power or group in an attempt to overthrow our current system of governance.

Neatly, he raises a straw man and then uses it to speculate that New Zealand Muslims might just be traitors.

It's worth recalling that this whole thing began when he attempted to take a knife onto a commercial flight.

Anyway, take a look at Peters' interview with John Campbell last night -- not for Campbell's dismantling of his subject (although that's good stuff) but to watch Peters' hands during the interview. They are a frenzy. Whether Peters was more angry or anxious is an open question. But he was clearly very, very wound up.

Bonus: Feel free to discuss the government's mystifying refugee deal here too -- it's actually a bigger race-relations story than that above. I shall not attempt to parse the logic of this agreement -- because in a capable and highly readable column Bryce Edwards has attempted to do so and come up dry.

Not news, but Wishart was foaming-at-the-mouth insane on the radio this morning. His argument was, "How can you object to the bigotry of this column when Investigate has published lots of other bigotry in the past that you all conveniently ignored!"

I'm disappointed that no-one (that I know of) has challenged Prosser's assertion that "most terrorists are Muslim". It's a very myopic, quasi-US-centric, view and ignores goings on in all sorts of places, including Spain, Northern Ireland, the drug-war related terrorism in Mexico etc...etc...etc...

we go through this once every 6 months or so. if it's not women wearing burqa's banned from buses, it's cartoons, it's various politicians or authors. some little spark and "we" get to have "the debate" all over again as to whether muslims are good or bad, happy or sad. leaders of political parties get to have their faces in the news and posture about inclusiveness and to express OUTRAGE at such terrible remarks. let's see how many political points we can score on the back of this current incident.

frankly, i'm sick of these conversations and i'm sick being used as a political tool. and that is exactly what happened in this case.

Prosser apologised to Kathryn Ryan for the style and manner of his delivery, but skirted around the message.

I actually sympathised with him for having his knife confiscated. I had to hand over a nice little Leatherman on my key ring when leaving Sydney last year - though they let me carry on a bottle of Scotch that I could have killed people with!

But the guy's a racist prick, and a carpetbagger too - Winston's quality control is a bit lackadaisical I reckon.

Fairfax carried a story this morning that unnamed NZ First MPs were privately ropeable over Prosser's self-outing. Presumably this is mostly Denis O'Rourke, aka NZ First's intellectual wing, who's unlikely to have anything to say since he went into permanent hissy fit mode back in October.

Others have made better comments than I could on the serious issue at hand, so I'll just derail onto a quote from "The (Uncensored) Thoughts of Chairman Frank" (i.e. the late Frank Haden) whose crack about Winston's hair came to mind after reading your line about the headphones: "I don't think Winston Peters' hair is even made of hair. I think it's plastic. It doesn't move in the wind. It's too shiny altogether, it could well be ebony carved in Indonesia."

I actually sympathised with him for having his knife confiscated. I had to hand over a nice little Leatherman on my key ring

This has been a bugbear with me since I first began to travel by air* - I have, since I was 7 years old, ALWAYS carried knives - they are the consummate human tool. I've had complex (& v. expensive) Swiss Army multitool knives confiscated - and I KNOW the blades were under 6 cm...

What struck me was that calls to "ban Muslims from (our) planes" - alongside calls to "ban the burqa" and "arm the vulnerable (whether they like it or not)" are all entirely routine talking points for the populist right.

I've probably read hundreds of comments to this effect on blogs (indeed, on Kiwiblog alone) and on news sites that allow comments. I never listen to talkback radio but suspect it might not be much different.

Of course, the difference here is that they're spoken by an MP (albeit a rather inconsequential one), and not by "Anonymous Online Hatemonger #437", but there's probably a decent constituency for it. More than the crucial 5% anyway...

It's got NZ First back in the news, highlighting precisely the "issues" it's always sought to champion, as Russell notes. Mission accomplished?

Hmm...this is right on top of Key's proposal to keep the (muslim?) boaties away from our Fair Isle. Heh. I listened to Prosser make this point this morning about the "timing" of Ferrar's comment.

The problem is that few read the misnamed "investigate" so it probably took that long for a the relegated-to-the-doctor/dentist copy to circulate to David. Check his appointment diary.

As I was listening to the Prosser interview this morning, I think I heard Katherine mentioned what the Human Rights Act can throw at him. What I thought I heard was that you can do him for the wogistan comment ( national origins), his looks (ethnicity/race) but not for his religious comments. Is this right???

Is the Human Rights act that secular??? Discrimination for religious reasons is a no no but "disrespecting" is ok it seems.

Along with all the others. There's plenty of anti-female skew in a wide variety of world religions, some of which we tune out because we're more familiar with it. I mean, there's a perfectly good reason Catholic women can't be priests, right? Or Mormon women aren't supposed to work outside the home?

Prosser didn't lose his knife, he just had to check it into his luggage. Another thing I've seen happen is that you can post knives home from the airport.

The theory behind disrespecting religion being ok is that while race etc isn't a choice, religion is, and is therefore up for free discussion. I'm not sure I buy that, but the alternative can be ugly - the Catholic church wants to arrest a guy in India called Sanal Edamaruku for pointing out that one of their miraculous bleeding statues was the result of a leaking pipe. He's facing blasphemy charges.

but the alternative can be ugly - the Catholic church wants to arrest a guy in India called Sanal Edamaruku for pointing out that one of their miraculous bleeding statues was the result of a leaking pipe. He's facing blasphemy charges.

Yep.Almost all Abrahamic religions are anti-female BUT - Islamic ones are much WORSE in their *physical* control of *all* women (the women dont have to be religious cohorts.)